This article is part of an ongoing international research project conducted by MBC Management Business Consultants on family enterprises in different countries and cultural contexts.
The objective of this research project is to find out how family business culture influences the interpretation that family enterprises have of opportunity discovery, risk taking and business planning in determining their business success.
In this project MBC discusses how the use of ethnography, participant observation and narrative analysis can help entrepreneurship research conduct studies of greater multiplicity about what determines the success of family businesses.
Entrepreneurship research by resorting to participant observation and narratives to gather data on family enterprises and analyse it, generate quantitatively measureable opinion variables that will help compare how business culture in different settings value opportunity discovery, risk taking and business planning as determinants of business success.
Without seeking to undermine the validity of current methodological views in the area of entrepreneurship and family business, this project seeks to provide researchers and practitioners with an alternative approach and method of studying and understanding family enterprises.
